I was very touched by this article in Quadrant, the only journal which seems to be publishing accurate articles on Indigenous issues (and I'm a Leftie saying that! what has the world come to ?):

http://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/bennelong-papers/2013/06/indigenous-squalor-and-the-third-world-cliche

The image of Indonesian kids, all clean and beautifully dressed, streaming out of rat-hole slums in Djakarta, almost had me in tears, it really did. I've seen similar pictures of Tanzanian kids like that, keen, clean, so enthusiastic, and you imagine the work their mothers have gone through to get them ready and how much they invest in those beautiful kids.

And then you know that Aboriginal kids even in remote settlements have so much available and waste it. What a travesty.

Poverty ? Rubbish.

Meanwhile, in the cities, Aboriginal people work for their living, and are making sure their kids will have to do the same .........

Like everybody else. Fair enough.

Joe

About 20 years ago a friend of mine worked in the NT building houses for them at taxpayer expense, within 1 year of the aborigines moving in the houses built were only good for demolition.

They would hire a plane to go and get grog, or pool the money and buy a 4wd for a grog run.

Australian taxpayers do not force them to be drunks but we are forced to pay for there stupidity.

Enough is enough, give them food stamps or food only until they have sobered up and kicked the addiction to alcohol.

The more we try to help them monetarily the worse they get.

There are lots of good aborigines that have made good lives for themselves and there offspring, time the Government said no more for there own sake.

Loudmouth Joe the thought and feeling shows in your post.
I share both.
Often I think the entrenched failure may well,be the out come this country wants.
As a tool to let self destruction do its work.
You do not, believe me, have to go out back to see its just as bad not far from any city.
Maybe we of the left of center are as bad as the ranting right.
While our aims are good the out come is not.
Education is a tool not used enough, not just for the kids but parents to, on going education.

Both previous posts are spot-on observations. I just want to add the huge sums of taxpayers' money that goes to these communities & then straight into bank accounts of the incompetent bureaucrats who are the main cause of those dreadful situations.
Just like in our society it is the incompetent in the communities too who are appointed to the jobs they fail so miserably in.
Education too is failing miserably by sending incompetent teachers whose only incentive is the money & benefits & scope of promotion. The EPA, the licencing units, that fanaticism of football etc all contribute to the appalling situation. The Nr1 cause are the do-gooders who don't even go there. Whenever someone has a great idea to deal with the situation they are called racist by those do-gooders.

part of the problem is the myth of this wonderful peaceful lifestyle in the bush before the wicked whities destroyed such harmony. Must admit though some of these old bushman look at the rat race we live in and don't want a part of it. Unfortunately the kids are the ones who grow up without parents and with no opportunity often hoping they might get some mining money to top up centrelink payments.

Ok, I read the article and accept what joe and others say as correct.

Now, what has not been tried yet? How do they get the kids clean and healthy and to school? How do they stop the violence and stop the abuse?

Is it just a matter of not having grog available?

A couple of years ago, I heard of an Aboriginal community, near Newcastle, that had the worst abuse record of all. That apparently was turned around to be one of the lowest. I cannot recall the places name and I do not know what has happened since, but something must have been done right then. Be interesting to know the name and recent history.

Hi Banjo,

Perhaps a rule should be: if money has been poured into a 'brilliant' initiative and there is absolutely nothing to show for it, STOP.

It may mean sacking a hell of a lot of social workers, welfare workers, community workers, engagement officers, inclusion officers, liaison officers, home-makers, well-being officers, etc., etc. but the bottom line surely should be: if no tangible results, close it.

After all, we're talking about many billions each year.

Jay has put up this article on another thread - absolutely mind-blowing:

http://www.theage.com.au/national/growing-them-up-20130527-2n613.html

Joe

Dear Joe (Loudmouth),

The following link may be of interest:

http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/4055530.html

Yep ! The degree bearing do-gooder legacy. I hope they're very proud of the irreparable damage they have caused since that Goaf turned the steering wheel to the left.

Loudmouth said it all, and I agree.
Just take the time to think.
Not to see what is, and blame one side.
But ask your self should we be proud or not of our failure to change in the last 200 years.
Noel Person calls for and end to sit down money, and some do not see doing that brings about true improvement.
Would we ever let a whole white suburb live in this way.
We would in fact not.
Accountability education and harsh love are needed here.

We have posted thousands of words in dozens of threads about this subject.
And I would love to see us do it again here.
I feel some fail to understand just what Loudmouth meant.
And what I do too.

We could for days talk of the dreadful things said and done,by Aboriginals to us.
Then the same length of time on the other side telling of what we did to them.
Both debates would contain truth and lies, right and wrong.
If I was sent here say from the UN to investigate why folk live like this, I may well think it is forced on them,always, that would be untrue.
Some far wiser folk than me post here, like to hear from them, like to see too views about why the money is wasted or stolen almost always.
What we think, on both sides, is not changing anything.
CEDP did, it gave jobs, community based jobs.
Nothing helps on the climb out of povity more than a job, not a shadow of one.
One that assures work outcomes.
Any thoughts.

First let me say to all you whinging buggers…get stuffed…no offense.

Every cent spent on our first Aussies stays in the country. It goes to retailers and tradesmen, local people.

Piss it up against the wall or not, it does more for us than it does for them sadly. Whinge about the money we send away to alien bureaucrats for the carbon tax rubbish, or for Muslim schools in Indonesia, or, or , or.

Belly>> Some far wiser folk than me post here<<

Thanks china. Given you want my view on why the aboriginals are not like us and just can't get it together in our society, can't be focussed on possessions like us....it’s in the genes. A handful of generations from the stone age and you people expect Wall Street….leave them alone.

Joe your thread premise is particularly repugnant….just saying. Comparing blood lines of an evolving Asian culture and the Stone Age yesterday of our first Australians.

Hi Son of Gloin,

Your recent post-but-one - remember that only around 10 % of Indigenous people live in remote sink-holes, and around 60 % live in urban and peri-urban areas and are working, and that urban population grows, from one Census to the next, by 20 % - and after all, Indigenous university participation rates are around 65 % of non-Indigenous Australians' - in fact, Indigenous women are participating at universities (at least the 18-509 age-groups) at a slightly better rate than NON-Indigenous males. Would you like the figures ?

The upshot is that the great majority of Indigenous people live in towns and cities, and a majority work, alongside non-Indigenous people, socialise with them, marry them and have kids together. It worked for me :)

On cultural change: people aren't stupid: from the letters I've been typing up of the SA Protector of Aborigines between 1840 and 1906, it's clear that Indigenous people were quick to adopt more effective technologies as they became available.

For example, from the earliest days, amongst the rations handed out (and there was quite an amazing range of items counted as 'rations'), were fishing lines, fish-hooks, netting twine and boats. 'Boats' meant canoes, i.e. pointed at each end, fifteen feet long, five feet beam.

So, no surprise, fishing spears quickly fell into disuse. It's a hell of a lot easier to sit on the river-bank, especially in winter, wrapped in a blanket, and throw a line in and wait, than to have to wade through the near-freezing shallows looking for the odd, dumb fish stupid enough to come close to the bank. By 1886, for the half-Centenary celebrations, and for Q Victoria's Jubilee in 1888, the Protector tried to get the coppers up and down the Murray and around the Lakes to ask if any of the old fellas know how to make a fishing spear. No luck. How about a bark canoe ? No luck.

[TBC]

[continued]

It's called cultural change: we all grab what's most effective. What did you do on the day you worked out how to use a computer instead of an electric typewriter ? I recall that I stopped using white-out tape from that day - I'd just bought a box of tapes, and never even opened it. Still have it somewhere, unopened. Cultural opportunities, cultural change.

Forgive me, I'm not sure what you find repugnant in my postings. Please let me know and we can clear that up.

Cheers,

Joe

The Quadrant article is spot on. Which means it will never come to light if the political 'Progressives' have their way. No way it will be discussed on the ABC's Q&A, that goes without saying.

On the beach,

I spent four years at an Aboriginal settlement across the mid-70s as a laborer, my wife Maria running the pre-school there. A few years later, we had gone off to tertiary education, and in 1982 I did an income study of this particular settlement. I found that the median income at this place was equal to the Australian average median income. In fact, people there were better off when you took low rents into account.

It was incredibly traumatic: I contemplated suicide but instrad went off and applied for a taxi licence. So I can understand how difficult it may be for people involved for it to suddenly hit them that so much of what they believed was not so. It took me a lot longer, another twenty years, to begin to doubt the entire notion of self-determination - a wonderful notion - but came to see it as a fraud.

I must confess that I met Frank Pledge many years ago, in an outback pub, well sort of a 'pub' - he was a dogger and bush-geologist, the sort of bloke you move away from even in a remote pub, but I came to realise he was an incredibly erudite man, thwarted in love by a beautiful woman and hounded by multinational mining companies for his profound but secret knowledge. He came into 'town' only every few months, unwashed and barely able to speak. But we built an odd sort of friendship until he disappeared again. One of our best bush-philosophers, somebody you imagine Henry Lawson would have drunk with. I'm overjoyed that he is still around and now writing.

Joe

Hi Joe and thank you for this thread, the article and your potted history as well.

My much lesser exposure comes from my own and family experiences as farmers (cattle mostly), as a contractor to State and federal government (but mainly to private companies) and from years of going bush, some of which was into indigenous lands on permit.

Joe>> The image of Indonesian kids, all clean and beautifully dressed, streaming out of rat-hole slums in Djakarta, almost had me in tears, it really did. I've seen similar pictures of Tanzanian kids like that, keen, clean, so enthusiastic, and you imagine the work their mothers have gone through to get them ready and how much they invest in those beautiful kids.

And then you know that Aboriginal kids even in remote settlements have so much available and waste it. What a travesty.

Poverty ? Rubbish.<<

This racist dribble is what I find repugnant Joe. Your observation that Asian and African kids are keen, clean, so enthusiastic, and our own native kids are sheit according to your knowledgeable inference, who voted you arbitrator.

If you want to do some crying Joe, cry over aboriginal child mortality rates or the fact that first Aussies die 17 years earlier than the rest of us.
http://www.aihw.gov.au/indigenous-life-expectancy/

“Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples born in the period 1996-2001 are estimated to have a life expectancy at birth of 59.4 years for males, and 64.8 years for females. This is approximately 16-17 years less than the overall Australian population born over the same period.”

http://www.healthinfonet.ecu.edu.au/health-facts/overviews/mortality

Aboriginal children aged 1-4 have TWICE the death rate of the same age group in the rest of the population.

TBC

Joe we are part nature and we are part nurture and the Aboriginal kids have been short changed on both accounts when it comes to “fitting in” and “toeing the line. They are not psychologically equipped for it. The Australian aboriginals had the keenest eyesight of all humans, they needed it for hunting, nature gave it to them through evolution, but it did not equip them for cold water immersion into our Caucasian culture.

Not third world indeed sport. Your mate Frank Pledge can make all the comparisons he likes to the “third world” he has experienced because the comparison is not even near valid. If he was comparing our brothers and sisters with another 100 odd years out of the Stone Age culture and found a difference, then he could make some assumptions…as it is he is full of himself, another self proclaimed arbitrator.

Thank you, Son of Gloin,

You have to break down those figures - you always have to, in all fields of Aboriginal affairs - city versus remote, working- versus welfare-oriented. If you did, you would find that in the cities, especially amongst the majority of Indigenous people who are working, life expectancy is not much worse than it is for non-Indigenous people. Five or ten years, maybe.

BUT in more remote settlements, the gap in life expectancy is far, far higher - maybe up to forty years.

Forty years.

40 years. Not 15. Yes, people are dying very often in their late thirties and early forties, usually from the grog, ganja or violence.

I think that every bloke I worked with up in the 'community' has gone now, and most of the women too. I had one good friend who died, mainly from the grog, in his twenties. Others in their thirties. My wife's best friend on the 'mission' topped herself at 33. A couple of my work-mates drowned in the Murray, as well as a couple of kids. One other kid ODd on petrol in a tent. Another friend of my son's was burnt to death trapped in a car after an accident. At least one other 20-year-old died in a car accident.

All of this in a 'community' of barely 120 people. I reckon I must have gone to a hundred funerals there. I helped to dig some of the graves too, some for people I really loved and respected. I remember one week when three people died, I think in early 1974, including the Chairperson, a wonderful old bloke, really dedicated. Christ, I'm already fifteen years than he was then. Life's not fair, is it ?

So yeah, I'm sort of aware of the difference in life expectancy. But thanks for reminding me.

Have a good night.

Joe

SOG! nice of you bloke .
To give such unchallenged evidene some know bugger all about the subject.
Not having a go at you bloke, you do the best with what little you have.
And its nice to see you being happy,and wrong in every post.
Loudmouth the word will send the pidgins in the air, but Socialism ,and we have it in part, must take new paths.
I came from not the squalor but you can bet on it the poverty these folk,sorry in bigger numbers than you think, live in.
My mum and dad however knew of better times.
They force fed us [so happy they did] to get a job and plan our lives around it, give a fair days work for a fair days pay.
Buy a block of land build a home.
If it costs more, but is controlled and made to be productive, every race in our country should be given work never Never the dole.
That should stall those looking at race as the problem.
WE CREATED the sit down money driver of both poverty and we in not demanding better, are as bad as any in the case of the ruined houses.
240 ks away from Sydney conditions are as bad as any place.
I unlike SOG demand better

I, like others, am waiting to hear how to tackle the problem. Again I ask, what has not been tried.

Like Belly, I to grew up in very low income family and one of 8 kids, but that is no reason for squalor. Mum had us all clean and tidy with warm and safe beds to sleep in. We were also taught about right and wrong and to respect others. So why is it aboriginals want to live in squalor.

We desperately need answers and to try to get some self respect into the communities. The high death rates reflect the squalor, neglect and abuse.

I think it's what you get when you are straddling two cultures, and yet not buying into either of them with any real commitment

When your own culture is unravelling, when there is no overarching system in which to plot your course, when communities are rendered slack-jawed inebriates in a haze of alcohol-induced stupor....hopelessness

There are of course children in Asia and South America who are forced to scavenge on rubbish tips for their survival - these on the outskirts of urban centres. In Mumbai, there's a square mile of slums, hosting a million people called Dharavi. The people there have formed tight-knit communities and most of Mumbai's recycling is done from the adjoining rubbish tip. I'm supposing these people manage because they have quite an impressive community and they have a purpose.....their culture sustains them, they've adapted to their situation, even in a situation most of us couldn't imagine.

I'm also surmising that they wouldn't have a hope in hell if their communities were awash in grog.

Poirot,
There are many very enterprising business people in India and Asia, so why are the places you speak of not 'awash with grog'? There are parents, in India and Asia, that sell their kids into the sex trade, so why not grog? Is it their religion?

Is grog the problem here or just one of many?

There was a hell of an outcry when some communities were made grog free and imposts put on pensions to restrict what could be purchased. what has been the outcome of that and has it improved the situation for the women and kids there? I suspect not, as the government would be trumpeting it from Canberra.

Can anyone tell me the place near Newcastle that dramatically lowered the kids abuse rate and what has happened since? They must have done it right.

Poirot I value you and your input, have no idea what your exposure to these people has been.
But disagree, with the way you approach this subject.
Grog is forced down no mans throat, yes filth make big money out of taking it in to dry areas, that filth is one both sides.
Banjo my plan says SHOUTS! give them and every one no dole, but a job, with dignity and hope, a job that if needed as long as it produces some thing, leave to study for a better one.
We can and must see jobs are not taken from others , but give to both worker and community.
We must ENFORCE school attendance and require an end to not learning for the kids.
Public housing should ALWAYS be monitored and all damages paid for, by any one.
We by not inflicting rules and a tough but truelove fail our selves too.
Cheap and nasty racism, from both sides must have meaningful impacts fines prison.
Above all keep the trouble making do gooder,s away.
We must train the next three generations to lead as well as Noel Pearson would if he was given the job, being the victim if only in their own heads is no path to the future.

Belly,

It's all very well to say no-one forces grog down their throats.

But do you deny that, coupled with a directionless disconnected life experience, that grog is one of the biggest problems in these communities?

Why do people drink so much that their lives are conducted in a anesthetized cloud. No one forced my dad to drink, but once it got a hold, he just carried on regardless...which led to all sorts of problems and destroyed our family.

I don't know what it's like to live in an aboriginal community like those we are presently discussing, but I'm probably one of the few non-Aboriginals here who have lived in a "mission" and enjoyed the same status as the Aboriginal kids who were there, having been removed from their families.

So what I noticed is that this mission was fairly well run, and the Aboriginal children well decked out and clean, enjoying good food, doing "all the work" around the various houses and totally disconnected from their carers. I know, because even though I'm not Aboriginal, my drinking, feckless dad wangled me into that place for quite a few months while he was working at a nickel mine.

It certainly wasn't a bad experience. From going to chapel on Sunday mornings to catching "our bus" at high school.....the one perception I'm left with is that they were materially cared for in an environment where the people were kind, but religious (little comic books with pictures of hellish torment for those who weren't saved)...but these kids didn't connect with the carers at all in ways that help a child develop.

Belly>> SOG! nice of you bloke .
To give such unchallenged evidene some know bugger all about the subject.
Not having a go at you bloke, you do the best with what little you have.
And its nice to see you being happy,and wrong in every post<<

Thanks china, I try to do the best with what little I have…lol… and that seems to be the crux of the complaint against first Aussies, supposedly they do not do the best with what they have been given. But I assert that they are doing the best they can, and because it does not meet Caucasians expectations they are supposedly rubbish people from the vibe of this thread.

Belly>> They force fed us [so happy they did] to get a job and plan our lives around it, give a fair days work for a fair days pay. Buy a block of land build a home.<<

China, those are the values of the Caucasian, and how inherent that is to our psyche is exampled by the family dynasties that built Europe and the New World. Whereas our mate’s great grandfather had a Stone Age mind and had not moved past hunter gatherer….As I said what do you want from them, a Plato, a Rockefeller, an Einstein?
I am not discussing first Aussies who have lost their peoples colour and appearance because they have a fair slice of our genes.

Banjo>> I, like others, am waiting to hear how to tackle the problem. Again I ask, what has not been tried.<<

That sums it up Banjo. We first treated them like children via the missionaries, and then a government of self serving whites treated them like second class citizens, and finally a corium of blacks mismanaged their futures with raging nepotism seeing a few prosper and most go further down the gurgler.

Even when the handouts came from their own they lacked appreciation of worth…how great a new house is compared to a trashed one. As a people they have no concept of ownership and worth when it comes to personal wealth. They have only owned one thing, the land, and they respected that.

Poirot>> ...their culture sustains them, they've adapted to their situation, even in a situation most of us couldn't imagine.<<

As did the first Aussies, the lived in a harsh land for 60,000 years and their minds adapted to a low intellectual denominator, their minds had no new input, it had no stimulus other than the knowledge needed for survival. Banjo remarks that we have tried everything and nothing gets through, it is because of their minds. Their minds do not have our values.

It’s not an us and them issue, it’s a them and their minds issue.

Son of Gloin,

There's no such thing as a 'Stone Age mind', not one that anybody's born with anyway - and in the earliest days, Aboriginal people learnt very quickly sometimes about new opportunities offered, and new requirements demanded, by the 'Martians' suddenly in their midst. Of course, children were the quickest to pick up new ways of seeing and doing.

And we forget that after the 'Invasion', physical mobility was greatly enhanced by horses, carts, ships - down this way, in SA, by 1845 - seven years after the 'Invasion' - the Protector remarked that he had noticed that when Aboriginal people met each other, they tended to speak in English: increased mobility after all brought many different people from different groups into contact with each other, and they tended to talk about things in common, and in relation to jobs, crops, animals, opportunities, grog, money, where to stay, etc., which necessarily were in an English-language domain.

It depends, SoG, how much interaction and day-to-day contact and experience people have: down this way, in southern SA, interaction was so many-sided from the earliest days, in terms of improved methods of hunting (guns, fishing gear) and a sudden explosion of new 'stuff' - clothes, grog, tobacco, tea, sugar, money, sheep, horses, ships - that I'm sure some younger people were swept up in it all very quickly - but without necessarily perceiving any loss, quite the opposite I suspect.

And after all, it was soon (from 1851) written into every pastoral lease that Aboriginal people had the same rights as they had always had to use the land. Henry Reynolds has written about this, with Jamie Dalziel (1996). In the Protector's letters, there is only one occasion where he has to remind a pastoral lessee that the terms of his lease (1876) included these use-rights. Those conditions were still in pastoral leases in SA into the 1990s.

Keep learning - I hope we all do :)

Joe

No such thing as a Stone Age mind Joe? The truth is that in physiological terms we all have a stone age mind in a modern skull, but that’s not the point here. You are saying that the mind of a Stone Age man and a modern man are the same…there is a field called evolutionary psychology that would disagree with you.

Have a look at this Joe.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNW_B8EwgH4

Sog,
There may be some truth in what you say, but not entirely. If there were only two types, black and white, it could be somewhat acceptable. But there is a mixture, so how do you account for that? Are you saying that with a certain ratio of white heritage the person then gets values of possessions worth, if so what is that ratio and how do we take it into practice? How many more generations before you think aboriginals will have the mind set to integrate and adopt our values?

Poirot,
If access to grog is the problem, how do we tackle that. Prohibition, for parts of Aus or on ratio of heritage. Difficulties there! Do you know what happened to the kids raised at the mission. Have you come across any?

Belly,
Where are the jobs? Was not mining mobs willing to employ aboriginals and has that been successful? what about the areas where there are no mines or jobs, do we move them to where there are jobs? That would cause a rukus.

Do we just simply carry on and see if aboriginals drink themselves into oblivion and the few that survive integrate into 'Our' society, like some already have.

At least I would like to improve the lot of women and kids. I am not having a go at you people, I just see more questions.
It is one helllava problem.

Banjo>> There may be some truth in what you say, but not entirely. If there were only two types, black and white, it could be somewhat acceptable. But there is a mixture, so how do you account for that? Are you saying that with a certain ratio of white heritage the person then gets values of possessions worth, <<

Absolutely, 21st century denizens. Now consider the outback aboriginal communities, the ones with hardly any of “us” in them. These peoples carry a completely different value structure than their urban cousins with a not so homogenous blood line. Do you recall “going walkabout,” it is a real aberration of these folks, not so among the mixed race urbanites.

The unadulterated first Aussies mind is psychologically different from modern man. The "walkabout" is an excellent example of a psychological driver that motivates this race to up and leave a structured environment for no reason and without fore thought, they just go walkabout. I have seen some splendid candidates strive, accomplish, then ruin their prospects because of an inherent psychological motivation that they immediately act on.

Poirot to solve that problem we need to storm over those who think it is white man fault only.
I have watched generations steal cars to ram raid grog shops.
Saw many die in smashes and more get short prison terms, then do it again.
A *culture* developed, right here in tourist type near coastal towns.
This youths some not yet teens say *its better than home* prison or boys homes.
That is sad, ever walked in to such a home?
I have.
Saddest thing I ever did.
How did us whites fill that home/those homes with every form of dirt
Grog is a symptom, not the cause.
Think out side the square , do we want an end to this?
Do we want police cars to be the free taxi service to take these folk home,or a tool in helping the future we must demand.

G'day Belly,

I'm so glad really that so many people are concerned enough to contribute to this thread, to stick their oar in, good and bad, for and against, it's great. What to do, what the Christ to do ? Noel Pearson touches on one aspect today in his Australian article - that people must first and foremost take responsibility for themselves and their own future, and the future of their kids.

One thing that strikes me is the utter smugness of so many Aboriginal 'leaders' - apart from Noel Pearson, of course, I would die for him - that whatever problems afflict Aboriginal people, they have been caused by white people, you and me, and Aboriginal people don't have to do bugger-all - the white fellas have to come back and fix it all up - since it's all their fault.

No. That's not going to happen.

History is a bit like a hit-and-run accident. Some poor bugger gets knocked down and is lying there in the gutter. People rush to help and the 'victim' says "No ! The person who drove that car must come back and completely restore me to perfect health, like I had before."

Not going to happen.

Amy Wax has written about this beautifully (check out Google). History is a cruel b@stard - so much happens and the perpetrator doesn't come back. That's how it's been, even for Aboriginal people, for fifty thousand years.

So the sensible thing to do is to pick yourself up, if possible, curse the b@stard who did this to you, drag yourself off to hospital, get fixed up as best you can, and get on with life.

Welcome to the world. How many times do you reckon Syria has been invaded and pillaged ? Once ? Twenty times ? Fifty times ? Almost in every Syrians' life-time. Life can be a bitch.

[TBC]

[contd]

So - what to do in this case ?

Step 1: find ways to pass responsibility for people's lives back to those people. Find alternatives to life-long welfare and the dole [a.k.a. CDEP]. Ah, but how ?

Step 2: what sort of supports do those people genuinely need to do that ? Training ? TAFE ? Generation One-type programs ? Programs that connect real jobs with necessary training ? how hard can it be ?!

Step 3: surprisingly, that may be up to the people themselves.

Joe

The main problem is that the white man always "thinks" he understands the problem, "thinks" he is capable of formulating solutions and then makes laws to enforce those solutions.

Rarely, if ever, do the aboriginal people themselves play any decisive role in formulating these imposed "solutions".

We see it here on this very thread. Everyone "thinks" they understand exactly what's happening and the causes. It makes for very sad reading.

Hi PJack,

Well, no, I don't think this has been the case for a long time - 'communities' decided how to manage CDEP, and almost universally 'decided' to corrupt the scheme, by allowing people to do 'home duties' and mow their own lawns for twenty years and more, and call it 'two days work each week'. Community developoment ? training ? Almost never.

Down this way, it has been alleged that, when the Howard government ordered some CDEP programs to be closed, the 'community' decided to pay itself out for long-service leave, holiday leave, sick leave, even superannuation, and then set the bill, eventually, up the chain of accounts, against DEEWR. In the millions.

Consultation, yes. But not a complete lack of evaluation of projects and their viability and common-sense. And frankly, until 'communities' can get themselves organised enough to run simple projects like vegetable gardens, if I were the government, I wouldn't put any store by their 'decisions'.

Cheers :)

Joe